The aptly named Christian Smith, professor of sociology at Notre Dame, has posted an article in First Things claiming that “man” (sorry women) is a religious animal. With a gender correction, the question he poses is: “Are human beings naturally religious?” Setting aside for a moment that the Christian professor at Notre Dame probably has [...]
Tags:Christian Smith·essentializing·human nature·human universals·Man the Religious Animal·Neolithicization·Nietzsche·Notre Dame·Plato·secularization
Between 800 and 200 BCE, a remarkable series of sages, mystics, and thinkers gave rise to the transcendental traditions that are known today as “world religions.” In 1949, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers identified several themes common to these traditions and described this six hundred year period as the Axial Age: “These movements were ‘axial’ [...]
Tags:Akkadia·Alan Strathern·Assyria·axial age·Buddha·Confucius·Daoism·death·ethics·Hinduism·immanence·Jainism·Jaspers·Judaism·Karen Armstrong·Karl·Mesopotamia·monotheism·morals·Plato·Platonism·Socrates·suffering·Sumerian·Thorkild Jacobsen·transcendence·world rejection
While doing some background research on the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), I discovered that he had been much influenced by Lucretius, who lived in the first century BCE (around the time of Julius Caesar) and published a six-volume treatise titled On the Nature of Things. As if writing philosophy in narrative form were [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·atomic theory·Charles Darwin·Christianity·classics·cultural evolution·David Hume·David Sedley·Epicurean·Epicurus·evolution·Greco-Roman·Herbert Spencer·Julius Caesar·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·Nietzsche·On the Nature of Things·Plato·Platonic philosophy·prehistory·Scottish Enlightenment·skepticism·survival of the fittest·Thomas Hobbes
In yesterday’s post, I asked “What is Spirituality?“ Naturally, today’s post asks “What is the Spirit?” It is a related and timely question, especially given Eric Simpson’s recent post over at HuffPo Religion, “The Tyranny of the Body in the Quest for Spiritual Life.” In keeping with the Western metaphysical tradition, Simpson simply assumes there [...]
Tags:Aquinas·Augustine·Cartesian dualism·chimera·Christianity·commonsense dualism·dualism·Eric Simpson·folk psychology of souls·Immanuel Kant·Jesse Bering·metaphysics·mind-body·Paul Bloom·Plato·pre-Socratic·Rene Descartes·soul·spirit·Western metaphysical tradition
